Benches and pillars...

... a little tunnel of lovely and grim!

[finished version on my [url=http://www.blipfoto.com/entry/1456522]Kinda Horrigans[/url] journal]

Actually, not that grim in the original shot - the weather was overcast but this is somewhere I've wanted to photograph for a while... but there were always people milling about before. The horrible weather meant that no-one was around, which meant I could take the photo I wanted - empty and quiet.

So, processing - not actually that much. Three things really. First, converted to black and white using Silver Efex Pro. Actually, did this twice and then used a layer mask to bring out the bits I wanted as the overall darkness in the first version meant I was missing a little of the detail of the ceiling and pillars (but I wanted to control it as the ceiling overpowered it if I left in all the detail). The next thing was just a little dodging of the highlights on the pillars and burning some of the shadows as well as the edges of the foreground.

Then... sharpened (it was just too soft in the 'before' version - in processing the RAW file I bumped up the clarity a little too which also helps before sharpening), flattened and saved.

I know people might prefer the colour version - but I wanted drama. So it had to go black and white!

Tip of the Day:
Completely and utterly irrelevant... but Australia is on my mind at the moment (for various reasons!), and browsing LightStalking.com for images, I came across this page and noticed one of my photos (with my Flickr user name of Maddy Lou) on there from when we lived in Oz! OooOOOoh!